From rhapsodizing LSD to hollywood’s juiciest hookups

I have taken up these so-called corporate apartments till the end of the month until I find a place to live in. The one I am living in is quite plush with all the top-notch amenities including Viking appliances and this really fat-a$$ flat screen tv which lulls me into lounging around the couch and doing nothing. The living room window overlooks the lake shore drive (LSD), seductively curving around Lake Michigan. The headlights of cars fleeting by at night take a stance on the viewers emotional state. The view itself has a fluent flow of poetry without the ostentatious opaqueness.

My textbook had arrived via UPS in the morning and I was waiting for an excuse to start reading it for the first class assignments. I have taken advanced microeconomics (no, I do not have any background in micro) solely because every GSB speaker during the orientation had extolled the professor to such an extent that I made a last minute change in my schedule and decided to go with this course. I went through the syllabus and it seemed like this course also delved into the macroeconomics of things. To understand how the aggregate economic quantities (study of macroeconomics) operate, one needs to understand the behavior of firms, consumers and workers who constitute such markets. The advanced course seemed to cater to both aspects (apparently) and the other plus side being the professor. So I decided to give the first few chapters a read so I could come prepared for the first class.

Alas ! That was never to be. I made the egregious error (alliteration not intended) of turning on the television. And there it was. One of the channels was running ‘101 Juiciest Hollywood Hookups’. Usually, I hate watching such channels, they being the sucking sump pump of sensationalism pandering to the lowest human instincts. But lethargy got the better of me and my weakness to get up from the couch and expend energy to open the hardcover package made me just stay put and watch the program to the very end. And that, my friends, is how I spent the entire day. Its time I seriously overcome the inertia and hit the books.

If any of you has anything to comment on, please do. My listening is as assertive as my banter.

PS: oh if by any remote chance you are still wondering, it was Brad and Angelina to get the #1 spot on the juiciest hookups…sheesh!!

The unsung heroes of the GSB: the admissions staff

I wanted to exclusively dedicate a posting to the true heroes of the GSB. These are the people at the frontlines. These are absolutely beautiful people who carry on about their jobs with a lot of patience. These are the admissions staff for the part-time program at the GSB. Everytime I have called or emailed them (and thats a lot of times) during the admission process, they have been really courteous and prompt in answering my questions. I am sure they have to be swamped during the admissions, and to answer our calls and queries the whole day with a charming mien is commendable. Dean Snyder surely has hired the right people for this. There are many in the admissions staff, but the ones I interacted with were (in random order):

• Beth DePauw
• Humberto Freda
• Crystal Smith
• Gretchen Cooper

Next time you are in the building, drop in a thankful word for them.

Midwest by Southwest

I finally arrived in Chicago.. for good, in time for my classes starting next week. Last week I was in Chicago for the orientation, details of which haven’t been posted due to an absolute lack of time. I went back to California and had hardly 5 days to pack up, settle all unfinished business and catch a flight back to Chicago. As I hailed a cab from the Midway airport, I had mixed feelings of coming back into the city. Chicago – with its humid continental climate with temperatures going in the negative (fahrenheit) in the winters – is really not my idea of spending the next cherishable years of my life, but maybe it is. I have lived in chicago before (in the burbs, however) and every time I curse the place when I live through its chilly winters, there is always a phase in the summers when I go through withdrawal symptoms reminiscing the previous winter.

Relocating from a city with pristine charm (that city goes by the moniker of San Francisco) to this urban maelstrom called Chicago, I was in a cab within minutes of picking my bags from the Southwest airlines baggage claim. After exchanging pleasantries with the driver a few minutes into the ride, I glanced across the dusty chicago skyline through the cab window. Belching smokestacks as seen from the expressway did not add to the amusement of my 8 pm drive . San Francisco, with its eclectic mix of Victorian and modern architecture, its Painted Ladies, the sight of the historic cable cars negotiating the uphill crooked terrains of the financial district and its near 70 degree temperatures throughout the year, will surely be missed in the days to come as I now ensconce myself in this concrete jungle. Sure, chicago does have a charm of its own. It will only take time for it to run deep inside of me.

The cab took me via lake shore drive. The gentle breezes of Lake Michigan made an attempt to get a pleasant closure to the day.

Getting organized, hitting the books and letting Chicago ‘happen’ are in order.

course registration and bidding

I spent the last 2 days just reading about the course bidding system at Chicago and trying to ferret out (from all the course reviews, professor reviews, professor bios) the best courses for me this quarter. All of that while trying to wrap up my work, packing my stuff and preparing for my flight to Chicago. The orientation starts tomorrow and includes course registration and bidding which is the day after.

The Registration Bidding System (RBS) is entirely new to me albeit it is followed in quite a lot of schools. I spent more than a day just reading about it but still could understand fully well. Seems loosely based on the Dutch Auction system and seems unnecessarily complex. It is based on the free pricing system. Maybe it seems complex from a new student perspective, maybe the second/third year students know how to work it? What does not help is the fact that the schools own description of the RBS says that “it is impossible for you to figure out how the price was determined just from looking at your own bid”. OK. Granted. Then it describes in a birds eye view of what the program does and goes on to say ..”note that this is not exactly what the scheduler does..” Not helping either. So I gave it one last read. From what I understand the RBS algorithm considers this registration and bidding system as a linear program (the school web site says it is a linear program). Scarcity of a course imposes upon it an economic value which is what the students bid for, using bidding points instead of any economic wealth, of course. I can perceive the equation for any one course having a long list of variables including a separate constraint equation using binary variables to collapse the problem within the boundary of the number of seats for that course. If anyone has done any LP using Microsoft Excel, he/she would understand what I am saying. But again I doubt if Excel’s Solver is being used in to determine the course prices. (I am not trying to figure out how the RBS works to an extremely detailed level. I am just opining)

Also if it is a linear program, there has to be a sensitivity analysis (or a ‘what-if’ analysis). In LP, quite a lot of ‘what-if’ assessment is possible without re-running the model. Maybe the RBS spits out shadow prices and reduced cost equivalents for each course.

I was not able to ask any of my GSB friends about it (not that I have many). I am going to just leave it at that and hope I get educated during the orientation. Besides I have even heard that new students usually get what they bid for. Not sure if this is true.

The second day was spent in researching the professors. I had pretty much decided what courses to take but wasn’t sure whom to take it from. I looked up the thick curriculum guide that the school sent. Looked up each professor’s bio for the courses I was interested in. I then logged on to see the evaluations for these professors.
The course evaluations were all processed and presented as graphs. I made sure to choose the professor whose median rating was to the right of the mean (i.e. a right-skewed normal curve). Of course I had to make sure that even if the median rating is to the right of the mean, the remaining student responses (if below the median) were still not too significant in number. This was to ensure that the class was overall happy with the professor.

On the flight to chicago, as I type this up, I still gave the RBS one last read and then when I felt I learnt nothing new, I decided to give it closure for today. I still have about 2.5 hrs remaining on the flight. I am chalking out the courses for the next two quarters (Winter & Spring). I have started using MindManager 7 for Mac from MindJet. It’s truly powerful and a takes you away from the linear nature of note taking. I hope to use it a lot during the MBA. Hopefully my Powerbook G4 should last during the MBA journey as well.

Immigration Calculations

I just finished watching a television program on KQED titled ‘Immigration Calculations‘. As an immigrant myself, I thought this program touched on downright philosophical issues. The program, though mostly centered on giving numbers and statistics also introduced an interesting concept of the ‘hourglass’ in the context of the immigrant and the american workforce

The graphic depicts the top portion comprising the high skilled workers and the bottom triangle comprising the lower skilled ones (e.g. day laborers, farmers etc). There were’nt many immigrants conforming to the middle strata of the workforce.

The program then went on to show how these immigrants are not competing with or displacing the american workforce by showing this graphic.

The orange diamond represents the american workforce, the blue being that of the immigrants. The middle strata on the orange diamond was the vast majority of americans and by superimposing the two workforce structures, the program goes on to prove its point that the vast majority of americans were in fact being complemented (sort-of?) by the immigrant population. I felt the graphics were very intuitive and drove home the point to an extent.

Blogger’s Digression on the theory of Comparative Advantage:
To further make an anti-protectionist argument, it would be interesting to know the numbers on the american workforce that got displaced. It would be even more interesting to find out the proportion of displaced population wanting to work and how many of those got into areas that they really wanted to. America should have its citizens work in the areas that allow the best application of their skills. Otherwise, there are lost opportunities to create wealth.

Coming back to the program (mostly geared towards the California demographics), it presented itself very methodically citing 3 cases from disparate sectors of the workforce: a low skilled immigrant worker who opened up a small business (mexican restaurant), a new arrival from Africa who had a post-doctorate (in organic chemisty) and the third case of a high-tech couple from India who came here pre-Y2K. In the case of the low-skilled immigrant, some of the program hosts mentioned how children of such immigrants are putting a burden on the public school system as the government subsidizes their education.

The program cited some interesting statistics that are worth a cursory glance:

• 75% of small businesses leverage the equity on their homes
• 40% of PhD students in Computer Science and Engineering are immigrants
• 53% of engineers and scientists in California are foreign-born
• The growth in US population in the first fifty years of this century (2000 – 2050) due to immigrants and their children alone is expected to be 60%

Blogger’s Digression on rights:
The program really enforces the principle endorsed by America’s Founding Fathers: individual rights – prerogatives that cannot be morally infringed upon. The case studies in the program were merely living by such rights: the right to life and its major derivatives: the right to liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness. The right to life means the right to sustain and protect one’s life. To sustain his life, man uses his rational faculty to gain knowledge and choose values and then act to achieve his values. The right to liberty is the right to this method; it is the right to think and choose and then to act in accordance with one’s judgements. The low-skilled worker, the African arrival and the Indian couple were doing just this. To sustain their lives, these case studies chose to create material means of their survival and acted with a certain motive – their purpose being their own welfare – the right to property and happiness respectively.